Actually you’re sort of wrong, but not quite. It turns out the fact the Netscape homepage was the default was a huge asset that was unused. At a certain point w

Actually you’re sort of wrong, but not quite. It turns out the fact the Netscape homepage was the default was a huge asset that was unused. At a certain point we realized we were leaving tons of money on the table and pivoted to the my Netscape stuff. If we had done that much earlier and built ourselves as a services and content platform much earlier with advertising etc we could have survived the browser revenue loss. But Barksdales view was we didn’t compete with our partners like yahoo and excite. The loss of browser market share would have eaten this revenue as well over time but market share eroded a lot slower than browser license revenue and it would have extended our revenues. The data mining industry didn’t exist at that time but it was obvious to me that with my Netscape and our content channels we could use the data we were collecting to do targeted advertising and “personalization.” That would have been the enshitification route we avoided by nobly imploding.